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Linux Support, The time has come...
xhrisxross
Member Posts: 8 Arc User
with about 2% global usage on PC's capable of supporting STO, I think it is time for us to invest in this operating system.
steam currently has up to 18 million users alone, of those users; roughly 797,112 use linux.
if one was to do a 60% intake of new customers for STO and each would buy $10-$20 worth of in game stuff, that would equate to $4,782,672.42 to $9,565,344.84 in total earnings for this game.
to me it is worth it just to add new players to STO yet I know profit is what greases the gears, and from what I can tell even a stingy ferengi would not turn away from such a massive return if it only costs $500,000 investment to have five coders spend a year making STO work on Linux natively.
Thoughts?
steam currently has up to 18 million users alone, of those users; roughly 797,112 use linux.
if one was to do a 60% intake of new customers for STO and each would buy $10-$20 worth of in game stuff, that would equate to $4,782,672.42 to $9,565,344.84 in total earnings for this game.
to me it is worth it just to add new players to STO yet I know profit is what greases the gears, and from what I can tell even a stingy ferengi would not turn away from such a massive return if it only costs $500,000 investment to have five coders spend a year making STO work on Linux natively.
Thoughts?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Linux as a gaming OS is a failure. The closest it gets to being successful is running Windows games using WINE.
Rocket League just dropped Linux support because there were not enough users to pay for the costs of upgrading it.
Other developers have claimed Linux versions get almost no use but generate support tickets way out of proportion to the tiny user base.
STO never had Linux support, but yeah, Mac support was discontinued as the 35 people using it didn't pay enough to make it worthwhile.
WINE for either Linux or Mac apparently does a decent enough job at running the game.
OpenGL is badly outdated and has a lot of problems with 3D (like for instance alpha layering errors) and so most game companies avoid it.
Vulkan takes care of that but DX has such a stranglehold on the market that Vulkan is not making much headway, and of course the lack of a lot of good Vulkan based games means that Linux is not used for gaming anywhere near as much as Windows machines so developers do not think it is worth making games for, and around and around it goes in a rut.
As for Wine, it is very iffy for games and most DX games do not run well on it. A few years back, before I had to get a Windows machine running for school stuff anyway, I tried using Wine for Champions Online and it did not run with any reliability at all. Since STO uses a variant of the same engine I would imagine it would not run much if any better (though Wine itself may have improved a bit in the meantime I have little confidence in it for games like STO).
but there is one significant issue which affects me - chat and team system (affecting all chatting and chat reading, team/player's search, and friend list accounts updating as well as offline/online status visibility to friends or off friends) does not (fully?) successfully reconnects after char switch. This is symptomatically solved by re-log to those who are affected.
1st logged in character is not (visibly) affected by that issue.
Note: up to now the chat offline issue seems to be affecting SOME yet not all of linux players, no windows user reported this issue as of now here. The few said to be affected allegedly used an intel GPU yet only SOME of those intel GPU users were affected. THE ISSUE APEAREAD ON 12TH OF NOVEMBER (together with an unknown crash and freeze on login's issue for SOME intel GPU users who reported to use windows here, no idea if related,) and wasn't solved since for the affected ones.
A NON accurate, newbie and NON tech savvy note: valve's proton used on steam play to play non native linux games uses a vulkan based implementation called dxvk.
looking at steam alone there exist roughly 18 million steam users, and by steams statistics 0.9% use Linux.
that equates to 1,620,000 Linux users for January 2020.
add the 80% take away, 1,296,000 users of Linux signing up to STO or any game for that matter.
now take that 1,296,000 user base and multiply by the cost of your game.
so $20 purchase of in game stuff (ships) = $25,920,000
$30 purchase (lets say KSP2) = $38,880,000
and so on...
60% take away, 972000 users.
$10 = $9,720,000
$20 = $19,440,000
$30 = $29,160,000
and now you can see the potential scale of income from just having a team of coders working a full year to make a new game engine that works cross platform.
Cause lets face it, the STO game engine neeeds a new update; but that is a tangent for another day.
with the evidence before me, IMHO, Linux is worth it.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=combined
There is way more people who speaks spanish in this game, part in Europe, Mexico and all South America, and that is way bigger, still, no spanish client or translation. Linux is too small and too many headaches to support.
$10 purchase = $6,480,000
30%
$10 purchase = $4,860,000
10%
$10 purchase = $1,620,000
by this math is is very possible to earn at minimum a million bucks just by making Linux support a thing on steam through a $500,000 investment into a team of coders to get it done.
What that should be telling you is that adding a Linux version would lead to a 0.9% increase in revenue. Actually less than that, 0.9% of the PC revenue not PS4 or Xbox.
60% of Steam PC users don't play STO, why would 60% of Steam Linux users?
There are thousands of games on Steam that I don't play, including some very good ones. Because I don't enjoy playing RTS for example, I prefer turn-based. I also don't play fighting games, platformers, most roguelikes, hidden object clicking, ...
I still don't get it since there is money to be made here especially with multi-language support.
what would it take?
also why not do both?
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
the percentage is of those willing to fork over a certain amount of money for a game.
so $10 in game purchases would put another million into the dev's pocket at the bare minimum of a 10% take away which is very possible. you also have to account for those that use WINE since steam does not count any PC that does not use steam at all. I bet you could find close to 20% of the current payer base uses WINE or other means to play STO right now.
I think the whole point is to make things easier for people to play the game natively without bugs.
A business needs to make profit not just money.
The money coming in year after year needs to be more than the cost of the initial development and the ongoing costs for maintenance and updates. 0.9% of the PC version's revenue won't pay for adding the developers, QA, and support staff.
A business also needs to look at what else they could do for the same amount of effort. Management can only work on so many things at once, and it can be hard to find enough good workers that you want to keep long-term.
A Switch or Playstation 5 version would have a much larger potential audience. Even a Stadia version would make more sense if Google was willing to pay some of the development costs.
hmmm. true.
100% take away at $10 = $1,620,000...
now I understand.
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
peak at 16 million users for today alone.
0.90% use Linux, potentially 0.5% to 2.88% WINE users on the windows side...
yeah still not exactly worth it but would be a boost to Linux usage if a major game advertised Linux support.
1.9% global market share of linux... maybe there is another way of looking at this.
without going the doubting route can we investigate what impact this would have on STO?
what about looking at the angle of pick your fav game and look at usage statistics.
warthunder for example?
You'd need to pick a game that attracts the same players as STO, which can be hard to guess.
I'll open my wallet for Fallout 5 but not for FIFA 2021, or Tekken 11, or Jumpy-Fun-Platformer, ...
The ones that do go for Vulkan are either brand new without a following or the games are not that popular to begin with so they are more willing to take that gamble just to break into or stay in the market.
Conundrums like that are what Microsoft uses to stay on top. In a more general sense it is also the reason why so many areas in the US and other places do not have access to reasonably priced broadband, there is not enough projected profit to justify installing the infrastructure to support it for general use and they get much more profit from treating it as a luxury service instead.
Anyway, depending on how those statistics are gathered and figured there could be a potentially huge market for Linux compatible games since a lot more people would be using Linux if they could game on the platform along with whatever else they do with it (currently I do not even have a full time Linux machine because of that for example).
I'm an example, I prefer linux (ubuntu with mate desktop -modified-), but for gaming and i mean sto because I play only at sto, I have no choice, I use win 10 on a second computer.
Should install fine if your using the steam client.
Go to settings in steam... and turn on Steam play beta. Make sure you select Enable Steam play for all titles. Select the latest version of proton form the drop down. (you can experiment with older versions but STO should run fine on the latest)
One you have that selected you should be able to install STO under Steam just like in windows. One difference to know is when you first launch STO under linux it will take awhile to load... Proton/DXVK likes to precompile shaders. This improves performance later but the first load will take longer then you expect. If it seems frozen just wait a bit.
Mint is not my favorite distro... but if you like that is cool. Just make sure you have the latest GPU drivers. Whatever your running google how to install the latest Nvidia closed source... or AMD open source drivers. AMD should be pretty much good to go out of the box... but you may want to make sure you are running the latest MESA and Vulcan AMD pacakges, Mint is based on Ubuntu and its slow updating such things you may have to do some minor research and make use of a PPA to install the latest. This is the main reason Valve has stopped using Ubuntu and moved to a rolling release based on Arch Linux.
Good luck.
https://www.protondb.com/app/9900
EDIT one other thing... in the STO launcher perhaps go to settings and turn of on-demand patching. I don't know what the current status is with that feature under Linux. I haven't tested it myself in ages.
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